Chubby, brunette Eunice Kinnison sat in a rocker, reading the Sunday papers and listening to the radio. Her husband Ralph lay sprawled upon the davenport, smoking a cigarette and reading the current issue of EXTRAORDINARY STORIES against an unheard background of music. Mentally, he was far from Tellus, flitting in his super-dreadnaught through parsec after parsec of vacuous space. E.E. "Doc" Smith, Triplanetary, Chapter 5: "1941"

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Rho Ophiuchi

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day shows the star fields and nebular clouds of the region around Rho Ophiuchi. This beautiful image is not from a space-based platform, but is a ground-based image (showing how far optics, instrumentation and computer power have come over the past few decades).

While this is not the setting of Jack Williamson's classic Humanoids tales, his use of "rhodomagnetism" and "rhodium" plus the world "Wing IV" always coupled that in my mind with this nebula. It would be a great backdrop to nighttime shots of a film project based on the stories!

Saturday, August 25, 2012

Neil Armstrong

The first man who stepped onto the Moon has passed away. We stopped building the Saturn V, threw away the Apollo infrastructure. We built the Shuttle and threw it away. We've had several iterations of replacements and they seem to go nowhere and probably will be thrown away. NASA is directionless.

Such a sad day in so, so, many ways.

Addendum (items will be added as I find them, if they are unique and interesting):Neil, Neil and Neal.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day shows Messier 72, a beautiful example of a globular cluster in the constellation of Aquarius. Globulars are among my favorite things to view with my telescope or even a good pair of binoculars. The strange thing about globulars (to me) is where you can find the most in the night sky: among constellations such as Sagittarius and Scorpius, towards the center of our own Milky Way galaxy. Why strange? Globulars are rare (having been consumed by their larger neighbor) and orbit outside the galaxy, so it is strange that it is easier to spot them looking towards the center, rather than out from the center (in the Milky Way's attic of the constellations on the opposite part of the sky from the two named above).

Richard Feynman once said in response to a picture of Messier 2, another globular cluster:

Friday, August 17, 2012

Down the Drain

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day shows NGC 5033, a nice spiral in the constellation of Canes Venatici. Ever notice how spiral galaxies from this angle resemble the whirlpools that form when you open the drain of your bathtub?

And the wheel of life draws to a close over another great one, Harry Harrison. Not of the Golden Age, but the age that followed. I enjoyed many of his books: Captive Universe, the various Deathworld tales, the Stainless Steel Rat stories and more. My brush with him was a brief attempt to purchase (for publication) a SF-RPG that originally had been developed by FASA based on his Deathworld tales.

It's amazing the number of mistakes or hoaxes you can find on the internet. For example, a number of people posted this panoramic view of Mars saying that it was from MSL Curiosity. Close, but no cigar: the solar panels are a dead giveaway (MSL Curiosity is nuclear powered). This panorama is from Opportunity and was taken over a period of time from 2011 to 2012.

Lots going on Mars even though Curiosity is still being checked out and set up! Will thos folks in Curiosity's Mission Control ever stop partying? For example, how about a view of the local area? The landing thrusters exposed bedrock! (And I wonder why so much of the surface above the bedrock is flat and uniform in appearance: did something erode or move away the boulders we've seen at the other landing sites?) Before and after views of the landing site: watch carefully and you'll see bits and pieces from the landing sequence appear. A closer view, here, shows the appearance of the ballast used in the landing. Similar image here (we sure are messing up the neighborhood!).

I think it was Kim Stanley Robinson who used the phrase from the title of this posting in Red Mars. With orbiters like Mariner and Viking, landers like Viking, Pathfinder/Sojourner, Phoenix, Spirit, Opportunity and now Curiosity, Mars is becoming "a place" more and more everyday.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is something that should make your jaw drop. If it does not, ask yourself: is there no poetry in your soul? A spaceship descends to the surface of another planet. The picture is taken by another spaceship in orbit around that planet. It is not our planet.

Another loss for the astronomical community, another childhood hero gone. Sir Bernard Lovell, founder of the Jodrell Bank Radio Observatory has passed away. Jodrell was featured in several of my favorite books of those formative reading years and I often thought that Bernard Quatermass was modeled after Lovell.

Monday, August 06, 2012

Snapshot Into the Light

I thought it was pretty amazing when they started sticking video cameras onto manned and unmanned vehicles and you could see shots of the shuttle from the viewpoint of the SRB, or an Atlas V boosting New Horizons to Pluto and so forth. Not satisfied with that, we have a shot of one vehicle landing on another planet (taken by another vehicle orbiting that planet) and a short video showing that vehicle landing (more to come as images are transmitted down).

Glad to see NASA didn't do the silly thing of shutting down Opportunity due to funding!

"If the reason we've got to stand down is because another wonderful vehicle is about to land on Mars, I'm okay with that," chuckled Squyres. "We're just wishing the best for MSL. This is a fantastic mission. It's their time. It's going to be a very exciting night when we land and years of excitement after that."

"Everybody's okay with this," agreed Arvidson. "We're in this business of Mars exploration for the long haul. It's a program not just a mission."

Salon picks up on the "amateur" effort to film H.P. Lovecraft's The Fungi from Yuggoth. From the same folks who brought us the amazingly fantastic silent Call of Cthulhu. Buy. Watch. Weep that Hollywood (think the failed effort on At the Mountains of Madness) can't do a tenth as well.

Reading the comments and reviews of the remake of Total Recall it is clearer (now more than ever) that most of the people who watch movies "based" on PKD and remakes of movies "based" on PKD have never actually read anything by PKD.

Thursday, August 02, 2012

John Keegan

Historian John Keegan has passed away. He was the first historian that I noticed getting a wide reading while I was in the Army and National Guard, I recall, for example, my First Sergeant reading The Mask of Command while we were doing tank gunnery. I've enjoyed all of his books, but most especially that title, The Face of Battle and Six Armies in Normandy (probably the first book I read about D-Day beyond my childhood favorite, The Longest Day). He made history interesting for me again, especially military history, after college when I was less interested in non-fiction than I had been before college.

For Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form):
01: The Doctor's Wife/Dr. Who (WINNER)
02: Remedial Chaos Theory/Community
03: The Girl Who Waited/Dr. Who
04: A Good Man Goes to War/Dr. Who
05: The Drink Tank

Wednesday, August 01, 2012

THE DEAD PAST.70 Years Ago, the world war had a chilling side-effect: 'Doc Smith's new [Lensman] book was slowed down for a while for he has gone to work for a big munitions firm as a Chemical Engineer, and since his work for the past twenty years or so has been Cereal Chemistry, and he had to do a little "boning up" on his explosives at first. But he expected to get at it soon the last time I saw him. so perhaps he is already working again in his spare time.' (E. Everett Evans, Futurian War Digest 22, August 1942) A critical insight from the same piece: 'Doc really writes TWO stories in ONE; the "bang-bang" story for the casual reader, and the deeply-plotted, carefully worked out psychological story for the deeper reader and thinker.'